News

I feel some people felt when I asked people to update to version 0.46.0 that this implied that version 0.46.0 was going to fix all the problems for you. When I said "Downloads might work sporadically or just not at all and service might be intermittent but it'll be fixed eventually" this meant "this new version of NMM is going to help out the situation immensely but we've still got work to do to actually fix all the issues, and there will still be issues". I hope this clarifies things for the people going bonkers that they've updated to version 0.46.0 and things aren't perfect.

Since this news post we've now turned off the web service support for versions before 0.46.0. So you now have to update to version 0.46.0 if you want to be able to login to NMM or download files. At this time I'm unsure if we'll ever open up legacy support for the previous versions again. It's presenting serious issues and while we like providing legacy support for people who, for whatever reason, don't want to update NMM to new versions, my main concern is focusing on what's ahead and not on what's behind. I'm sorry if this disappoints you, but that's my mind on the matter. We've spent a considerable amount of time (literally days) trying to sort this issue so that no one would need to update and so that we could maintain legacy support. There comes a point where you need to accept defeat and disappointment and just move on. I think we're at that point.

I'm also aware we've got some folks who moved to our alpha build of 0.50. We'll be releasing an update for the alpha to fix this for you guys, but it probably won't be until Monday. Sorry for that; sorry you're being penalised for actually trying to help, but we don't have the time to do it tomorrow unfortunately so I think you should know it'll be released on Monday.

We've performed more optimisations this evening and right now, 00:46am, things are running very smoothly both on the NMM side and the site side from what we can see (and what we can experience browsing around). I can't guarantee it'll stay this way, but it's a sign we're moving in the right direction.

Thank you for your continued patience. My original news post follows below:

One of the main reasons we've had to disable NMM over the past 5 days is because it directly calls our web services from the sites themselves. When too many requests occur, or those requests are bad for whatever reason, it directly affects the performance of the sites and that's obviously not good.

One of the beauties of our new cloud setup is that we can setup new "servers" instantly (technically they're now "nodes"). We decided it made practical sense to set up a new server that's sole purpose is to handle the requests that NMM makes. The reasoning should be quite obvious: if this happens again, if NMM brings down a server, it won't be a server that handles the sites and the sites will still work fine. We don't want a repeat of the recent situation and I don't think the popularity of NMM should negatively affect the people who don't use NMM.

We've released an update today, 0.46.0 that changes the connection settings in NMM so it no longer calls our web servers but instead calls the dedicated NMM node. To put it simply, the more people who update to 0.46.0, the less load there'll be on the web servers and the faster the sites will load.

On top of that we've launched NMM support for X Rebirth in this latest version. We recruited the help of Azhwkd on the Egosoft forums, who has worked on his own Mod Manager for X Rebirth, to help us get support for X Rebirth in to NMM. I'm very happy about this as it's allowed the two dedicated programmers we have for NMM to get on with their work while Azhwkd worked, with some pointers from us, largely on his own to get this code into NMM. It not only means we can keep our focus on current project but it also means that someone who knows the games well is working directly on that game's support. It makes sense. We're very thankful to him and he's been compensated accordingly.

This is something I'd love to see more of in the community: we've released NMM as open source not just so we're totally transparent about what's being installed on your PC, but also so that developers are able to help us out in a wide range of ways if they so wish. This includes the potential to get more games supported in NMM and I'm happy to compensate those developers for their time. Anyone can download the source code for NMM from our Sourceforge page.

At the moment the X Rebirth support is simple enough, it'll download the files from X Rebirth Nexus and place the files in the correct folder. In the future, if necessary, we'll be happy to work with Azhwkd again to get some more complicated functions into NMM for X Rebirth.

We continue to work on the sites and NMM over the weekend. Downloads might work sporadically or just not at all and service might be intermittent but it'll be fixed eventually. But in the meantime your best bet is to download this latest version of NMM as soon as possible, if you use it.